RSS Exploding Popularity
By now most of us should know RSS is a breakout technology for webmasters and internet marketers. If you still do not know what is RSS, check out here.
More and more people are using it to distribute content and to drive traffic to their sites. Readers have the convenience of reading the latest content aggregated in their rss reader without having to visit multiple sites daily. One of the major benefits of subscribing to your favourite news via rss is ….. you will not be having spam mail compare to subscribing to email newsletter. And of cause ….. if you still remember, readers subscribing to rss feed might just unknowingly get rewarded (Hidden RSS Reward).
With the exploding rss concept spreading, every big and small websites trying to include rss for their sites for any crazy purpose. Some have it just for the sake of joining in this rss crazed.
My ex-colleague who is working on one of the small local govt website. Her recent new site requirement, requested by end-user in-charge of that site, is to add in rss feed. She told me that the user in-charge dont even know what is rss and dont know what it does, but just want to have this functionality because every other site has it! I find it hilarious that some people just jump into a ship without knowing where it goes. As long as that ship is going to somewhere seems good 😀
RSS Submission
I have been running a RSS Directory for over a year and consistently review and approve rss feed submissions to the directory. The purpose of my rss directory is to index useful news and content feed so that other less savy webmasters are able to choose these useful rss content from the submitted feeds and embed easily onto their own website.
I have seen many kinds of feed submissions. News feed, blog rss feed, e-commerce item feed, article feed, video feed, etc. Because rss feed is so popular and effective now, everyone is trying to use it for site indexing purpose. RSS submission spam for my directory are growing over the past few months. Besides rejecting those adult, gambling types of rss feed, I also usually reject those feeds which use it as a sitemap, listing just all the pages in their site, reject those feeds from e-commerce affiliate sites having rss feed item all containing their affiliate links. And i hate those sites with dynamic rss feed. The webmaster will try to spam submit all kinds of keywords for their dynamic feed. Eg. rss-feed.php?keyword=seo, rss-feed.php?keyword=business, rss-feed.php?keyword=home-business, rss-feed.php?keyword=whatever-business, rss-feed.php?keyword=make-money, rss-feed.php?keyword=how-to-make-more-money …
One other thing that i’ve realized. There are many webmasters quickly create some blogs with a few posts at blogspot.com / blogger.com related to their niche and then spam submit rss of those blogs. Usually those posts contain tons of links to their own sites. I’ve also receive rss submission spam from pages quickly created at squidoo.com
Do they really think i am going to approve and index their thousands of spamming submissions? How are these going to be useful for readers? The wonderful value of rss and its main purpose is to distribute latest content or news feed, NOT abusing it to use it as an indexing tool!
Feel free to submit your rss to my PR 5 RSS Directory. However, as i’ve mention above, please do not spam submit if your rss feed has no readership value.